Oligarchy and corruption spur Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
So much for the cautiously optimistic tone of last week’s newsletter regarding Vladimir Putin’s intentions. I have in fact so consistently got Putin wrong that, for most of my years, I could have been quite a good contra-indicator. This is odd. I saw what he did to Chechnya at the start of my career. I was in Georgia in 2008, and in Crimea in 2014. I sat through the inquiry into the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London with polonium-210, perhaps the most deadly substance anywhere on earth, and wrote about the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal. Putin was responsible for all those terrible things.
In short, you’d have thought I’d have learned to expect the worse from him but somehow, I struggle to anticipate the actions of someone who, for the last decade and a half at least, has consistently meant harm to other people. Putin may be the closest thing real life has to a Bond villain, and Monday’s unhinged meeting of the Russian Security Council would barely have been more sinister if it had featured a shark tank and a white cat. It turns out that, although the long table looked weird, taking the table away looked even weirder.
I spent much of Monday evening chatting to three journalists whose opinion on the Kremlin I respect enormously, and the best analysis any of us could come up was that Putin had lost his mind. So, if you’ve come for anything more substantive than that, you’ll need to turn to Mikhail Zygar.
Zygar’s point is that Putin’s approach now isn’t too different to that of 2014, and I agree that this is a matter more of degree than substance. As such our response to it doesn’t need to change -- it is ever more important that we stop him and his friends hiding their stolen wealth in the loopholes of our banking system. We do not want the equivalent of financial sleeper cells popping up to undermine our economies in the way he has undermined Ukraine.